Who are "the millennials" and why should you as a marketer or manager care? With over 76M members of the Gen Y population, they cannot be ignored. Did you know it costs $24,000 to replace each millennial hire that leaves, and 91% expect to stay in a job for less than 3 years? Or that by 2014, Gen Y will have over $1.4 trillion in spending power?

We dived deep to research what makes millennials tick, and how both marketers and managers can get the most out of their workforces and audiences of this age bracket. In this blog, we will continue to cover how gamification helps solve many of the challenges to create more loyal customers and engaged employees."

- See more at: http://badgeville.com/2013/12/18/infographic-the-rise-of-the-millennials#sthash.n0JlHRuL.dpuf

Friday, 27 December 2013

MOOCs and adaptive-learning software are often billed as two of the most potentially game-changing technologies in higher education. The White House, for one, is excited to see what might happen if and when those two technologies meet.

It would seem natural to combine massive-open-online-course platforms, which accommodate thousands of students, with adaptive-learning software, which responds to the needs of individual students. But so far that has not happened.

The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology this month wrote a letter to President Obama briefing him on MOOCs. In the letter, released on Wednesday, the group told the president that while “the jury is out” on the long-term implications of MOOCs, the scale of the massive courses could yet improve access to higher education while reducing its cost.

If it does, adaptive-learning software may play a role, the advisers suggested.

“The new MOOC technologies should allow teachers to measure student comprehension in real time and adjust the material presented to students to achieve higher levels of competency,” the advisers wrote.

“One possible trajectory for the MOOC technology,” they continued, “would be to reduce the cost of education simply by economizing on the use of teachers, using computerized feedback to support a course rather than online or offline personal guidance by a faculty member or a teaching assistant.”

Many of those tests have produced evidence that adaptive-tutoring software can sometimes stand in for face-to-face instruction. A 2011 study involving six public universities tested the initiative’s automated-tutoring software in a scenario similar to the one proposed by the presidential advisers. It found that student learning in a statistics course did not suffer after the universities replaced a portion of classroom time with independent work with the software.

Could adaptive software help personalize the student experience in certain MOOCs?

“Absolutely,” said Michael Feldstein, a partner with the consulting firm MindWires.

Mr. Feldstein used to work for Cengage Learning, building tools aimed at “personalizing” the experience of using the textbook company’s digital content. He sees a “natural marriage” between MOOCs and adaptive software, which could help compensate for the absence of individual hand-holding in a massive course.

Candace Thille, director of the Open Learning Initiative, has criticized MOOCs for eschewing adaptive-teaching techniques. But when Ms. Thille moved this year to Stanford University, it seemed only a matter of time before Stanford’s massive courses got an injection of adaptive software.

But alas, Stanford is not building automated tutors into its MOOCs, said Dawn Zimmaro, a senior researcher of learning assessment and analytics at the university, at a meeting of MOOC researchers this month.

It turns out that creating an adaptive MOOC is more complicated than throwing Stanford’s MOOCs and the Open Learning Initiative into a blender together. Such an undertaking would probably involve a team of designers working closely with a professor, who would have to “cede a certain amount of control over to their team members who handle the adaptive part,” said Mr. Feldstein.

“It’s not likely to happen quickly,” he said, “because not every professor who wants to teach a MOOC is going to have the inclination to take a team approach.”

When it comes to a successful social media marketing strategy, it can be tough for small businesses to sort through the noise, statistics and flurry of misinformation.

One statistic we found online, for instance, claims that a Facebook fan is worth about $174 — but ask a small business with 300 Facebook fans if they've seen that $52,200 reflected in their revenues and you're likely to get a skeptical look or chuckle.

For small businesses seeking to engage audiences via social media and get the most bang for their buck, figuring out where to start — and more importantly, how to leverage the huge potential of an engaged online audience — can be a daunting task.

Let's forget about the statistics and wild claims, and focus instead on good, old-fashioned advice. Below, we've talked to entrepreneurs and marketers from companies with successful social strategies to get a grasp on some best practices for building and retaining an audience on social media."

Friday, 20 December 2013

A simple search of the flipped classroom topic still produces numerous responses. An academic search in ProQuest produces over 2,000 scholarly articles published in each of the last 4 years. Most of the movement towards the topic has occurred in the last few years. As more and more programs and instructors at all levels flip their classrooms, it is time to stop, reflect, and evaluate how well the efforts are working to improve mastery of content for students. A survey of some of the more recent articles provides a glimpse into the progress and efforts towards flipping classrooms.Read more in'via Blog this'

Learning management systems have reshaped the college experience, and continue to do so with each update and new option that hits the market. Still, for every new feature, it seems that there's always another innovation in demand by faculty, staff and students.

So what do higher ed CIOs want most from their learning management system providers? Following our 2013 "Mobility in Higher Education" survey, Education Dive interviewed several higher ed CIOs at institutions ranging from four-year public and private universities to community colleges and for-profit schools. We asked them what they'd change, if anything, about their LMS provider, and this is what they had to say.

"Jessie Woolley-Wilson is an eLearning leader who has served as President of LeapFrog SchoolHouse, Blackboard, and now as Chair, President and CEO of DreamBox Learning, creator of the Intelligent Adaptive Learning platform that teaches students at any level of understanding how to become better junior mathematicians.

This talk was given at TEDxRainier in Seattle on November 10, 2012. In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)
Category
Education
Licence
Standard YouTube Licence"

"Raj Dhingra is a twenty-year veteran of the technology industry with an extensive track record of building strong, sustainable and profitable industry leadership positions in new and emerging categories. Raj brings entrepreneurial drive and success, and a rich depth of corporate experience across general management, business development, product development, sales and marketing functions. Prior to joining NComputing in April 2011, Raj was VP and GM at Citrix where he led the company's desktop virtualization business from zero to half a billion dollars growth in sales over a 3 year period. As well as his leadership role in global virtualization companies such as Citrix, Dhingra has held executive leadership positions in public companies such as McAfee, 3Com, SonicWALL and startups such as IntruVert Networks (acquired by McAfee) and PortAuthority Technologies (acquired by Websense)."

"Paul Andersen has been teaching science in Montana for the last eighteen years. He explains how he is using elements of game design to improve learning in his AP Biology classroom. Paul's science videos have been viewed millions of times by students around the world. He was the 2011 Montana Teacher of the Year and he is currently a science teacher at Bozeman High School. For more information on Paul's work visit http://www.bozemanscience.com."

Barbara Chamberlin from New Mexico State University's Learning Games Lab shares five tips she has learned regarding game development and design. This presentation is an abbreviated version she shared with game programmers interested in gaming, and includes short suggestions for game development which are also applicable to app development.

Barbara Chamberlin, with the NMSU Learning Games Lab, shares the Educational Game Design model developed at NMSU. The educational development studio involves content experts and game developers in their game design process, also employing a rigorous user testing process throughout development. In this presentation, she explains the pre-development work they do in working from broad educational objectives, forming team, immersing team members in both the content and game design, and guiding questions for refining educational objectives and driving game development.

A look at the economics of MOOCs.

John Swope is the founder of curricu.me, an online MOOC aggregator that allows users to build and share custom curriculum with their students, employees and friends. His favorite MOOC is Dan Ariely’s “A Beginner’s Guide to Irrational Behavior,” and his personal blogtakes much inspiration from Ariely’s theories around irrational economics. You can follow him on Twitter @j_swope00.

Karen Roach/Hemera/Thinkstock

In three years, massive open online courses (MOOCs) have taken online education into uncharted territory. MOOCs promise to bring educational content to anyone with a computer, and companies like Coursera and edX are gaining attention amid an environment of stubbornly high unemployment, prohibitively expensive education and a nationwide skills gap. But the value of a MOOC education is still not clear. Critics argue that the meteoric rise of MOOCs will eventually collapse under the weight of a few key weaknesses — namely, high attrition rates and a lack of participation from underprivileged students. These criticisms, however, ignore the market forces that led to the rise of MOOCs in the first place and will continue to support the movement going forward.

Finally have enough time to attend, read, listen, watch and comment on anything I want to.

A MOOC is open in several senses of the word but by far the most important is the idea that they are OPEN IN SPIRIT, not open in any technical sense but open in a moral sense. This mean a genuine attempt to open up education to all through open access, low cost, online delivery. Access to powerful and free at the point of access educational tools and resources was available through Google, YouTube, Wikipedia and a myriad of other online resources. The Open Educational Resources movement also provided the ground from which MOOCs could sprout. More specifically, the Khan Academy came along with more structured video-based learning experiences. All of this was, from the learner’s point of view,open in the sense of being accessible and free.

7 dimensions of openness

But openness has several other dimensions relevant to MOOCs:

1. Open access

2. Open structure

3. Open educational resources

4. Open collaboration

5. Open accreditation

6. Open source code

7. Open data

1. Open access

The original intention was open in the sense of access i.e. anyone could simply sign up without prior qualifications but it signaled a moral agenda about opening up education for all, freeing it from scarcity and high cost towards a model of abundance and no cost. Cost is a big issue. There’s no such thing as a free munch (m for MOOC) but education wants to be free and this is a vital condition for universal, global access. The cost is being reduced to cents/pence per learners that is a great achievement.

2. Open structure

Many, not all, MOOCs are still tethered to the HE 6/8/10 week semester with a start date, end date, timetable and timed weekly releases of content. As the market progresses and we see that the ’18 year old undergraduate’ is not the audience but busy people with jobs and so on, lifelong learners. The courses are getting more asynchronous, available anytime and shorter. Coursera is still restrictive, delivered at set times, Udacity less so and EdX does have archived courses. This is good for access. Another footnote access issue is functionality on devices, some platforms are excellent, some appalling.

3. Open educational resources

The degree to which you can reuse, repurpose MOOCs and MOOC content is interesting. Many of the video resources on some platforms are on YouTube, similarly with other media shared-resources. Coursera is the least open with no open licensed content available. Udacity uses YouTube to host its videos and allows reuse under Creative Commons. EdX is more explicit stating that they hope to do much more in terms of open content. This spirit of openness is therefore building,.

4. Open collaboration

Almost all MOOCs offer forums of one description or another but this is still quite weak. What learners have been doing is spilling out into social media and physical meetups. Interestingly the data from the six Edinburgh Coursera MOOCs showed relatively low forum use (15%) but there can be no doubt that this is a dimension in openness. One could, and some do, argue that learner created content is another dimension of openness but let’s tuck it in here for the moment.

5. Open accreditation

MOOCs assess and therefore accredit on a number of levels from statements of completion (fine for most), certificates of distinction, through to online and offline proctored exams. It is important not to be too hung up on closure through certification and accreditation, as the majority of lifelong learners appear not to want even certification. Nevertheless, openness of accreditation would be desirable, perhaps through OpenBadges and freeing others to accredit.

6. Open source code

EdX have become a major player in MOOCland by making the code open source. This encourages participation, lowers costs and stimulates innovation. Openness in this sense may give them market advantage, especially as it’s in line with the spirit of openness I mentioned earlier. LINK

7. Open data

The University of Edinburgh (LINK) have published data from their six MOOC experiment and the Gates Foundation (LINK) are funding research into MOC data. But the degree to which data is harvested and disseminated is quite sparse. This is not an ‘open data’ environment (yet). Questions still need to be asked about who owns what data and what happens to that data after it is collected. At the moment we have lots of bare number stats about registration, who did what, when people stopped (a category mistake called drop-out) and so on, but as many platforms are not gathering meaningful data about the learners, even age, background and so on, entrance and exit surveys are still being done. Some interesting research is starting around harvesting qualitative data from social media such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook from MOOC users. How open is MOOC data – not very.

Conclusion

Let’s push at the door to see how open MOOCs can be. While it is important to be realistic on costs, ownership and data protection, we need to see how far we can take open access, structure, resources, collaboration, accreditation, code and data. Note that complete openness is not always a virtue. It is largely a matter of degree. The schema above could be used to score MOOCs on ‘openness’ but it is more important to move forward and accept that the MOOC landscape will have many players with many different models. To repeat what was said at the start, it is important to hold true to the spirit of openness, while allowing different models to flourish. To achieve this we must rise above the simple public v private, dropout v dropin, xMOOC v cMOOC dualisms. Let’s not skewer ourselves on the horns of false dilemmas just as the show is getting on the road.

Andrew Ng, the co-founder of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) provider Coursera, also talked ed tech at the event, which brought tech and civic leaders together to chat hot tech trends, from Big Data to e-commerce.

Friday, 13 December 2013

Now that Sebastian Thrun is moving toward vocational education with Udacity, experts are asking what that means for the future of MOOCs

Some aspects of MOOCs are proceeding ahead unchanged: Coursera just landed another $20 million in new funding and launched an iOS app, and Udacity is continuing with its Georgia Tech partnership to offer a computer science master's degree.

But at least one expert sees all of this as just another stage in online learning: MOOCs have never really been just one thing and they're continuing to evolve.

Sir Ken Robinson gives best talk yet at TED Talks Education

Creativity and education expert Sir Ken Robinson delivered two amazingly popular TED Talks prior to 2013. His first talk—presented sans multimedia in the true Sir Ken Robinson style — was made in 2006 and is the most viewed TED talk of all time. His follow-up talk given in 2010 also has been downloaded millions of times. I have seen Sir Ken speak many times and he is always inspiring and engaging, but his latest TED talk, presented at TED Talks Education in April of this year, is my favorite yet. Good presentation is a balance of information, persuasion, and inspiration. Presentations related to leadership must necessarily light a spark and point the way. Sir Ken does not scream or jump up and down but he nonetheless ignites, provokes, and inspires his live audience, and anyone else who cares to listen to his presentation on line, in a meaningful and memorable way. Millions of people have seen his latest talk, but just in case you have not, please set aside about 20 minutes to watch this outstanding, albeit short, talk below.

Thursday, 12 December 2013

by Chris Proulx, President and CEO of eCornellWe have been hearing for the past 18 months that higher education is on the precipice of a massive and disruptive transformation because of the #MOOC. The assumption has been that the traditional undergraduate educational experience would be a quaint and outdated notion in less than a decade. Not so fast!

This has been quickly followed by the release of new research by the University of Pennsylvania, United States that #MOOCs are largely serving a well-educated audience and not those who are most in need of a new and affordable educational experience. #Coursera is said to also be moving toward corporate online education and points to a pilot arrangement with Yahoo. In a recent interview, founder Andrew Ng was quoted as saying “We think that many companies view#Coursera as a quality, convenient, inexpensive way to continue employee development.